FullReviews Index

The Writer's Notebook
Every summer for the past six years, Tin House has conducted summer workshops at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Writers come from around the country to lead seminars, panels, and readings on various aspects of the craft of writing. 'The Writer's Notebook' is the culmination of these past six years of workshops, featuring essays from a prominent list of contemporary authors including Jim Shepard, Aimee Bender, Steve Almond, D. A. Powell, and Chris Offutt.

Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain
The act of reading is a miracle. Every new reader's brain possesses the extraordinary capacity to rearrange itself beyond its original abilities in order to understand written symbols. But how does the brain learn to read? As world-renowned cognitive neuroscientist and scholar of reading Maryanne Wolf explains, we taught our brain to read only a few thousand years ago, and in the process changed the intellectual evolution of our species.

This Year You Write Your Novel
Anyone can write a novel now, and in this essential book of tips, practical advice, and wisdom, Walter Mosley promises that the writer-in-waiting can finish it in one year. Intended as both inspiration and instruction, the book provides the tools to turn out a first draft painlessly and then revise it into something finer.

The Well-Fed Writer: Back for Seconds
In The Well-Fed Writer and The Well-Fed Writer: Back for Seconds, Peter Bowerman makes the bold claim of being able to teach his readers how to achieve financial self-sufficiency as freelance writers in six months or less. Sound impossible? It is if you you're confining your notion of freelance writing to short fiction and journalism...

The World in a Phrase: A Brief History of the Aphorism
The World in a Phrase by James Geary is for lovers of words and seekers of wisdom, a lively history of aphorisms—the shortest and oldest written art form—and the intriguing people who have penned them, from the Buddha to Emily Dickinson.

The Elements of Style Illustrated
The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E.B. White has for decades been an essential tool for English language writers and a central feature of the writing curriculum for students. The 1959 handbook gets a 2005 facelift with the addition of Maira Kalman's fanciful illustrations in a clothbound edition published by The Penguin Press. Maira Kalman is the illustrator of numerous children's books and covers for The New Yorker magazine.

The Little Guide to Your Well-Read Life
What would you read if you had the time? What would you learn if you could? Spend just three hours with Steve Leveen's Little Guide to Your Well-Read Life and you could gain a lifetime of greater fulfillment as a reader. The secret, as Steve will tell you, is to know how to fall—and stay—in book love. That's easy to do, once you give yourself permission to read your way.

The Marino Mission: One Girl, One Mission, One Thousand Words
Learn SAT vocabulary words the easy way! Instead of trying to memorize word lists, students can pick up "The Marino Mission," a 200-page novella containing one thousand of the most commonly tested SAT vocabulary words. Wtih a brief definition of each vocabulary word unobtrusively at the bottom of the page on which it appears, "The Marino Mission" is an easy alternative to traditional SAT vocabulary study.

Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation
In Eats, Shoots & Leaves, former editor Lynne Truss dares to say, in her delightfully urbane, witty and very English way, that it is time to look at our commas and semicolons and see them as the wonderful and necessary things they are. If there are only pedants left who care, then so be it. This is a book for people who love punctuation and get upset when it is mishandled.